Epilogue #2
Later, after dinner, after presents, after Nate gave a toast that started inappropriate and somehow ended with everyone misty-eyed over survival, love, and “not letting bullets or emotional constipation win,” Dylan took my hand and led me outside.
No one stopped us.
That should have warned me.
The night had gone deep and cold. Stars scattered over the ranch like shattered glass. The snow reflected enough moonlight to turn the yard silver. Dylan walked slowly because the ground was slick, and though he healed well, cold still made his side ache sometimes. He never said so. I knew anyway.
We stopped near the corral fence.
The house glowed behind us.
Laughter drifted faintly through the windows.
Dylan turned toward me.
He looked nervous.
Actually nervous.
My heart stumbled.
“Dylan?”
He reached into his jacket pocket.
Everything in me went quiet.
Not scared.
Not exactly.
But suddenly every moment of the last year seemed to gather around us.
The hospital. Georgia’s ring on the table.
The carnival lights. The bungalow. San Diego mornings.
Lily crying into moving boxes. Edge calling me baby girl.
Regan telling me I was not Mandy’s sins.
Dylan’s hands building walls, sanding floors, making space for a life neither of us had believed we could have.
He lowered himself onto one knee.
Carefully.
Because romance was romance, but the man still had scar tissue and I was still a nurse.
“Do not hurt yourself proposing to me,” I blurted.
His mouth twitched. “Beautiful.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“Your form is questionable.”
“Destiny.”
I pressed my lips together.
He took my hand.
The warmth of his fingers cut through the cold.
“I had a speech,” he said.
“Of course you did.”
“It was good.”
“I’m sure.”
“Had fire metaphors and everything.”
“I would have left you in the snow.”
“I figured.” His thumb brushed over my knuckles. “So I’ll keep it simple.”
My eyes burned before he even opened the box.
The ring inside stole my breath.
Turquoise at the center, deep and vivid as desert sky after rain. Tiny diamonds framed it, bright but not showy. Along the band, mother-of-pearl shimmered faintly, soft as moonlight. It was Mandy and Tarak and Edge and Dylan and me. Not ghosts. Not wounds.
Pieces of the story made into something whole.
“You told me once I didn’t get to decide I wasn’t in your story,” Dylan said, voice rough. “You were right. I tried. I ran. I called it protection, then guilt, then honor. But you were written into me before I knew how to read it.”
A tear slipped down my cheek.
He swallowed.
“I don’t want to own your future. I don’t want to rescue it.
I don’t want to stand in front of it and call that love.
” His eyes held mine. “I want to build beside it. I want your bad days, your night shifts, your matcha, your stubbornness, your scary best friend, and whatever level of visitation rights Lily gives me with Cupcake.”
I laughed through tears.
“I want the house to become ours when you’re ready,” he said. “I want your shoes by the door and your books on the nightstand and your basil judgment in the backyard. I want every ordinary morning you’ll give me. I want the hard ones too.”
My hand trembled in his.
He looked down for one second, then back up.
“You’ve been my almost for too long,” he said. “I don’t want almost anymore.”
The cold disappeared.
The world narrowed to his face.
“Destiny Rourke,” he said, “will you marry me?”
I should have had a clever answer.
Something sharp. Something teasing. Something that kept me from crying all over the man kneeling in the snow.
But love had never made me clever when it mattered.
Only honest.
“You’ve been written in since the fire,” I whispered.
His face changed.
The same way it had the night I agreed to one date.
Relief.
Joy.
Disbelief that life could be kind after being so hard.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes like the word hit him physically.
Then he slid the ring onto my finger.
It fit.
Of course it did.
Dylan did not stand right away.
He stayed there on one knee, holding my hand, staring at the ring like he had built houses, survived bullets, lost years, and crossed every mile of guilt just to reach this small circle of metal and stone.
Then the front door of the ranch house opened.
Nate yelled, “Did she say yes or do I need to start emotionally supporting him?”
Lily shouted, “Don’t rush her!”
Regan screamed, “She said yes, didn’t she?”
Skye yelled, “I can’t see!”
Cal roared, “Get back inside before you let the heat out!”
Dylan looked up at me.
I started laughing and crying at the same time.
“Our family is insane,” I said.
“Our family,” he repeated.
Soft.
Wondering.
Mine.
Then Edge’s voice cut through the cold from the porch.
“Get up before your knee freezes. I’m not carrying you.”
Dylan looked toward the house. “Merry Christmas to you too, dad.”
Edge’s face turned red, his hand fisted but Regan was there keeping him in line.
Later that night, after the congratulations, the crying, the inappropriate toast from Nate, and Regan holding my hand for so long I thought she might never let go, Dylan and I finally escaped upstairs.
To the blue quilt room at Cal’s ranch, the one I always stayed in when the family gathered here.
The room had old wood floors, thick curtains, a heavy bed, and a window that looked out over the snow-covered pasture.
Someone had already turned down the blankets.
Someone else—Regan, obviously—had left a small bundle of fresh pine and ribbon on the dresser beside a candle that smelled like vanilla and cedar.
“Subtle,” Dylan said, shutting the door behind us.
I looked at the bed.
Then at him.
“Do you think they know?”
His mouth curved. “Beautiful, Nate announced at dinner that if I proposed tonight, he expected this household to observe a respectful one-hour noise buffer.”
I covered my face. “I hate him.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I deeply hate him.”
Dylan’s laugh was low and warm, and when I lowered my hands, he was watching me with that look again. Not the hungry, reckless one from the hospital. Not the guilty one. Not even the stunned, grateful one from the snow.
This was quieter.
Deeper.
A man looking at his future and still not quite believing she had said yes.
My ring caught the lamplight when I dropped my hands. Turquoise, diamonds, mother-of-pearl. Desert, history, promise.
Dylan’s gaze followed it.
“You okay?” he asked.
I smiled a little. “You’re asking me that after proposing in the snow in front of my entire insane family?”
“Yes.”
“I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“No,” I admitted. “But in a good way.”
His face softened.
I stepped closer and touched his chest. He was still in the dark sweater he’d worn to dinner, the one Regan had told him made him look “respectable but still dangerous enough not to bore Destiny.” Under my palm, his heart beat hard and steady.
Alive.
Mine.
Not because he owned me.
Because we had chosen each other.
“I thought the house in San Diego would be where this happened,” he said quietly.
I knew what he meant.
Not the proposal.
This.
The after.
The moment where yes stopped being a word and became skin, breath, hands, forever.
I slid my fingers up to his collar. “The house is still waiting.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But this is where my family is. This is where Edge told me I was mine. This is where Regan cried because I looked healed. This is where you asked.” I looked up at him. “So this is where tonight belongs.”
His eyes darkened.
“Destiny.”
I loved when he said my name like that.
Like he was careful with it now.
Like he knew names could be promises too.
I rose onto my toes and kissed him.
At first, it was soft. A kiss full of snow light and Christmas downstairs and the ache of everything we had survived to reach this room.
His hands settled on my waist, warm through my sweater, steady but not demanding.
Dylan always touched me like he remembered the cost of rushing.
Like even now, engaged, wanted, forgiven as much as a man could be forgiven while still learning, he would wait for me to choose every next step.
So I chose.
I pushed his jacket from his shoulders.
He let it fall.
Then he caught my face in both hands and kissed me harder.
The room changed.
The quiet stayed, but something under it caught fire.
Not wildfire.
Not destruction.
Hearth fire.
The kind that warmed a house. The kind people gathered around. The kind that meant shelter instead of danger.
I pulled back only long enough to whisper, “Lock the door.”
His mouth twitched. “Afraid of Nate?”
“I’m afraid of everyone.”
“Fair.”
He turned the lock.
The click seemed to move through me.
When he came back, I was already pulling at the hem of my sweater. His eyes dropped, then lifted fast to mine, asking even now.
I smiled. “Dylan.”
That was all it took.
He crossed the room and helped me ease the sweater over my head, careful not to catch my ring in the knit. The gesture was so tender and so ridiculous that I laughed softly.
“What?” he asked.
“You’re being careful with the ring.”
“I waited years to put that on your hand. I’m not letting a sweater take you out.”
My laugh broke into something warmer.
He kissed the ring first.
Then my knuckle.
Then the inside of my wrist where the mother-of-pearl cuff rested.
Every kiss felt like him honoring a different piece of me.
The girl from the fire. The woman from the hospital.
The daughter with Mandy’s diamonds and Edge’s eyes watching from the porch.
The nurse. The best friend Lily had cried over losing day-to-day.
The woman standing in Cal’s guest room with snow outside and forever on her hand.
“Beautiful,” he whispered against my skin.
I touched his jaw. “No ghosts tonight.”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“No ghosts.”
“No guilt.”
“No guilt.”
“No almost.”
His hands tightened at my waist.
“No almost,” he said.